Put Your Money Where Your Steps Are
If you’ve ever participated in a 5K, half marathon, marathon, or other walk/run event, you know that movement is an incredibly effective and impactful form of fundraising. Walking fundraisers offer an innovative approach to fundraising by bringing people together, building awareness, and raising the funds required to channel steps into real change.
Current walking fundraising efforts touch on nearly every problem facing the world, from fighting cancer to combating poverty. When there’s a symbolic connection between the cause and the act of walking, it only enhances the potential for impact.
After all, as the saying goes, “You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”
Walk a Mile in Her Shoes
Walk a Mile in Her Shoes: The International Men’s March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault, and Gender Violence allows men to literally walk a mile in women’s high-heeled shoes.
“Move your hips and swing your arms for balance,” reads the event’s instructions for walking in high heels. “Swing your arms. Do not flap them. You cannot fly, though with shoes like these you’ll feel like you can soar.”
While the event’s execution is indeed humorous — just picture throngs of men trying to navigate the streets in red high-heeled shoes — the event participants take the event and the causes it supports very seriously. Walk a Mile in Her Shoes was started by Frank Baird in 2001 after a small group of men decided to raise awareness about men’s violence against women by walking around a local park in high-heeled shoes. Now, tens of thousands of people have raised millions of dollars for rape crisis and domestic violence centers, sexualized violence education, and prevention and remediation programs by participating in Walk a Mile in Her Shoes events around the world.
The lighthearted nature of the event provides an entry point into deeper conversations about gender relations and men’s sexualized violence against women. The walk facilitates preventative education in order to educate men on issues of rape, sexual assault, and gender violence. Furthermore, the event helps match community members who have experienced domestic violence or sexual assault with resources for recovery.
“A lot of people think domestic violence and sexual assault is a female problem, but it’s completely not — it’s a human issue,” said one male participant at a Walk a Mile in Her Shoes event in Chambersburg, PA.
Through this event, walking provides an avenue for understanding, awareness-raising, and fundraising for treatment and prevention.
Walk for Water
The Project Concern International (PCI) Walk for Water offers another angle on the idea of walking in another person’s shoes. Through a 5K walking fundraiser on World Water Day each spring, Walk for Water raises money for clean water solutions, educates the public, and encourages conservation.
While many 5K run/walk events lack a connection between the cause itself and the actual act of running or walking, this is not the case with Walk for Water. Walk participants have the opportunity to carry actual buckets of water, simulating the journey that many people around the world take daily to get clean drinking water. This connection between the cause and the act of walking offers a unique way to understand the cause you are raising money for.
“The reason I love Walk for Water is because we get a feel for what families have to go through every day around the world to support each other and provide for each other,” says Sophia Visotcky, one of the high school students on the committee for organizing the 2015 Walk for Water.
Women in developing countries spend up to 10 years of their lives collecting water. The water they transport can weigh up to 44 pounds, significantly heavier than the Home Depot buckets carried on the 5K course. Time spent searching for water — up to six hours per day — means missing out on school or other work, also known as “time poverty.” While the Walk for Water course covers more than three miles, people around the world often have to travel double the length of a 5Kon much more treacherous terrain in order to have access to clean water.
Walk for Water will never perfectly simulate the actual conditions of transporting water in many developing countries. Still, it helps bridge the gap between places where people make multiple, strenuous trips per day to provide for basic water needs and places that can afford to waste 2.5 gallons of water per minute in the shower. Bringing together the goals of conservation, education, and fundraising has the potential to generate large-scale impact beyond the money raised at the event itself.
“When you ask public health experts what the one thing is that makes the biggest difference in saving lives and giving children a healthier start at life, it’s clean water,” says NBC7’s Mark Mullen, who was the Master of Ceremonies at PCI’s 10th Annual Walk for Water at Mission Bay, San Diego. Walk for Water events raise awareness for water solutions as essential components for sustainably fighting global poverty.
The money raised during the Walk for Water event goes directly to improving clean water access for communities. In 2016, for example, PCI partnered with Engineers without Borders to tackle Ethiopia’s water crisis. In order to more effectively spend the money, the needs were communicated by the community itself: repairing the community’s diesel electric pump and smaller hand pumps. By taking into account the community’s self-identified needs, Engineers without Borders was able to extract the highest possible impact out of every dollar raised.
Walk for Water events show that walking isn’t just a mechanism for fundraising: It’s also a vehicle for understanding the complex issue of global water security. This unique combination of understanding and funding allows resources to be more effectively spent.
While walking alone cannot end sexual assault or improve access to drinking water, walking is an incredibly effective and impactful tool for fundraising in these issue areas. When there’s a genuine connection between the act of walking during the fundraising event and the fundraising organization’s mission, the potential for impact increases substantially. By putting money behind the causes that people care about, walking fundraisers channel steps into real change in combating a broad array of global crises.
Want to join me in walking for a better world? Email me at crc107@georgetown.edu or connect with me on LinkedIn. To read more about how you can change the world by walking, check out my latest book It Starts with a Step on Amazon.
